You, you won't talk about what we see when the lights are outAnd I'm willing to hold your hand while you're lost,while you're so full of doubtWalk for miles, on your own loose ends, I'll find you thereI'll find you there

You, you walk up thin blue lines possible with realityAnd I, I see through small red eyes,glowing still at your uncertaintyOut of darkness you will come around, I know you willI know you willAnd I'll find youAnd I'll find you there
- posted by cjb @ 10:38 PM

CJB: Realism is an old mode. Sincerity isn't a defect in art, no more so than the reflexive skepticism/irony that pervades contemporary practice, but it doesn't guarantee aesthetic worth or "quality." (In passing, I don't like the "weakness" of much contemporary "sincerity": the hand-drawn and lettered 'zine; the big blue Bic ballpoint drawing of a robin or wolf in the middle of a huge expanse of expensive white Arches: the reflexive "protests" of young people so intimidated by their older peers that they flaunt their own belatedness and presumed inconsequentiality as the subject of their work. Yawn!)

Objectivity is a historical construct, and maybe interesting as a style ("objectivist style," qv. the Bechers, above) but I don't believe that it, in and of itself, is any guarantee of quality or worth, either.

Contemporary theorists of Neue Sachlichkeit were very eager to pin down specific physical differences between Expressionism and its antagonists. Here's Franz Roh in 1925, drawing distinctions: "Expressive deformation of objects / Harmonic cleansing of objects. . .Rich in diagonals / Rectangular in frame. . . ." Binary opposition is what they call this kind of prescriptive "criticism." Walker Evans' notion of "realist style" seems more reasonable to me: the recognition that compositional techniques are grammars that generate meanings that shift over time. (Evan Lee's photographs of everyday objects seem exemplary to me in their conjuction of a deadpan "realist" compositional style with a philosophical preoccupation with the irrational, the absurd, the supernatural: the high-speed collision of "objectivity" and its others).
- posted by cjb @ 11:13 AM